Compulsive tinkerer. Seed investor root.vc. Machine enjoyer @machinepix.
San Francisco, CA
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We're hiring an Associate at root.vc, and in the spirit of accelerationism, there is no ATS: just a Claude Skill.
Come work with us!
github.com/rootvc/claude-app…
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Laika is rightfully a legend but everyone forgets the French sent a cat to space and brought her back.
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1/ This Father’s Day, I compiled the most on-brand anecdotes of my dad, who is basically an Asian Ron Swanson. Thread:
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using more degrees of freedom to accomplish tasks slower is bad engineering
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The reason Japanese cities can have nice public bathrooms is bc the penalty for vandalism is three years in prison, the penalty for drugs in a public space is seven years in prison, and penalty for drug trafficking is life, all with 99% conviction rate.
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> career politician
> no enduring legislation
> buys multiple vacation homes
> flies in charted jets “for the cause”
> will retire a millionaire
Bernie is just a megachurch pastor for people who went into debt for social science degrees.
Happy birthday, Bernie Sanders, a leader who took socialism out of the margins and into the American mainstream for the first time in generations.
His contributions to the struggle for a better world are undeniable.
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I guess “people shouldn’t be murdered on public transit” is now a MAGA position.
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this official Lockheed photo of a Shinto priest blessing Japan's domestically-produced F-35 stealth fighter is cyberpunk af
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guys the pilot with zyn on the dash is callsign “mullet” and his f-15 Strike Eagle has an eagle with a mullet painted on it
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Nothing is more cyberpunk than this pic of the USS Peleliu and its Harrier attack wing in Hong Kong.
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in the 2000s my university charged like $300 for summer storage BUT you could buy surplus FIM-29 Stinger launcher cases for $200 so i put my clothes and books in one, sunk it in the river by my dorm, and retrieved it fall semester
they’re hard to find now and i regret selling it
Last weekend I was doing missile stuff too lol.
Got to muck with a FIM-43 Redeye launcher and take ref images(model coming soon). To get more measurements I have to go to Sweden sadly :(
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I thought I had an intuition for aerodynamics and then the Boeing CH-47 Chinook transporting a tree showed up.
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It’s crazy that the Biden administration allocated $42B for rural broadband expansion, connected exactly 0 rural homes to broadband, and now you can buy Starlinks at Target next to the discount jeans.
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3/ When we visited aquariums, my dad liked to visit the fish he had eaten or aspired to eat.
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The CCP watching Taiwan, an easily blockaded island, shut down its nuclear reactors and make itself dependent on LNG tankers for energy.
This morning, Taiwan decommissioned its last nuclear reactor, entering the last phase of its "nuclear-free homeland" energy policy.
In 2024, Taiwan imported 97% of its energy, making its energy intensive industries potentially vulnerable to blockade.
Given the ongoing interest in Taiwan's energy policy and vulnerability, we are re-sharing our visualization made several months ago showing the distribution of Taiwan's energy import infrastructure.
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Epilogue/ one more anecdote which I just remembered:
The saddest I’ve seen my dad is when he lost a bet and had to be vegetarian for three days.
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America is so dominant that Houston can look like this and still have a per capita GDP higher than Paris, London, Tokyo.
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19/ Like most 90s kids, I *love* Pokemon.
When I explained to my dad what Pokemon was, he nodded in understanding and told me he and his friends would catch and fight scorpions when he was stationed in Kuwait, and Pokemon was kind of like that.
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the funniest part of the red sea houthi pirate conflict is that the pirates keep posting super macho propaganda videos only to be annihilated while the captain of the carrier doing the annihilating is just tweeting about cute dogs and stuff
This captain only loves me for the snax. I was hoping for a more productive working relationship, perhaps a few team ups or something. Instead… just snax.
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5/ Related to meat and cooking, my dad thinks different kinds of kitchen knives are a scam by Big Cutlery.
He uses one huge cleaver, which he keeps honed to a razor edge, to do all his cooking.
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2/ My dad was trained as a military scout; growing up, we asked if we could get GPS for our cars. He insisted we learn to use paper maps and memorize routes without making marks.
Why? If you’re ever captured, you don’t want evidence of your plans.
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embarassing that Science Magazine is leaning into the whole Noble Savage bit now
reminded of the tiktoker who went to a Waorani shaman for an eye infection and was told to get antibiotics
A new #SciencePolicyForum highlights the value of teaching Indigenous knowledge alongside science in the classroom. scim.ag/5T6
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7/ My dad really likes light beer. When my sister was graduating from BU, my dad heard that frat parties served free beer. So he wandered into one and helped himself to beer. I hear that the brothers were too bemused to kick him out so he had a few beers and left.
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In 1963 socialists set the Urtabulak gas field on fire and couldn’t figure out how to put it out for 3 years so it burned 420,000,000 cu ft of gas per day straight before they just decided to nuke it.
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11/ When my dad had to plan a family trip he took us to… the Robert Moses Niagara Hydroelectric Power Station.
Standing on the shore, he turned to me unprompted and said “if you ever have to work for the government, work for a utility - they generate their own revenue"
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9/ The neighborhood blue jays started frequenting our house, which my dad liked.
Blue jays are known to be assholes. When my dad was on biz trips, his entourage of blue jays would attack our house and caw at 6 AM until someone went out to feed them peanuts.
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Fun fact: the blue paint increased frictional heating so much that the operational speed of the Concorde was reduced 20% when it was in Pepsi livery.
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6/ On the rare occasions we would eat out, my dad really liked dim sum. He had little patience for the carts and would stand by the door to the kitchen to intercept food as it came out.
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“There are people willing to commit felony assault over $2, and my solution to this is to let those people sit next to you on public transit for free”
And we've already seen the transformative impacts of eliminating the fare when we won and implemented a historic fare free bus pilot on one line in each borough.
Ridership went up. Assaults on operators went down. And people saved money. thenation.com/article/societ…
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13/ My dad bought a Rolex decades ago for work when it was on a list of certified chronometers for his engineering work.
I told him it was hip now and had appreciated, and he was flabbergasted. “Why should this appreciate when it is an obsolete technology now? That’s silly."
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4/ We grew up in a very cold part of New York state. During winters, he would turn the garage into a meat locker and hang up meat. We had to make sure not to hit them with the cars.
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Sorry, you can’t pretend whine that there’s an aristocracy when the manager of a cartoon beaver themed gas station gets paid more than the average doctor in NYC.
America has a de-facto caste system around a meritocratic aristocracy composed of well-mannered bankers, lawyers, doctors, and other MBAs with vague job titles, all determined by your ability to do algebra and answer a few questions about 3 paragraphs of text when you're 16.
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This is the Shimao Cross-Strait Plaza, which was designed by US architect Gensler and developed by for-profit real estate group Shimao Group Holdings Ltd, for ~$690M.
It has a 5-star Conrad Hotel which is part of Hilton Worldwide (NYSE: HLT).
China proves Communism Works..
Community note
This is the Shimao Cross-Strait Plaza, which was designed by US architect Gensler and developed by for-profit real estate group Shimao Group Holdings Ltd, for ~$690M.
It has a 5-star Conrad Hotel which is part of Hilton Worldwide (NYSE: HLT).
skyscrapercenter.com/building/xiame
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All robberies and burglaries should be tried as violent crimes because they have the implicit threat of violence.
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Now would be a good time to remember that every single eucalyptus tree in San Francisco is invasive and wildly flammable, but the city has been blocked from culling them by busybodies like the @SierraClubCA (who also lobbied to stop prescribed burns in Los Angeles to tragic effect).
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End/ Anyways there are an endless number of these anecdotes, but point being, thanks for everything dad. I think. ❤️
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22/ Like many dads, my dad tracked how tall I was on a wall. This seemed uncharacteristically sentimental.
I learned that he would bet w the local Chinese restaurant proprietor on my future height. If my dad was right, we wouldn’t have to pay for the next meal.
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12/ My dad’s other favorite family trip was taking me and my little sister to the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station and explaining military vehicles to us.
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when i was at microsoft i saw the same two guys hanging out in the cafeteria all day playing board games—eventually i asked them what they did and they said they were contractually obligated to maintain Office for Symbian OS for another few years
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Progressive politicians in San Francisco fought to release a man with 73 felonies who killed two women. His trial has dragged on for five years.
When someone assaulted the husband of an SF politician, he got life in prison in less than two years.
SF attorney Scott Grant is arguing that a man w 73 felonies including killing two women should be released without prison tomorrow.
This is the disdain @sfgov has for its citizens and any official silent about it including new mayor @DanielLurie is complicit.
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Nothing has captured the essence of the American Left so neatly as two self-important hobby protesters blocking a mother begging to let them go feed her kids.
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Tell me your engineering team is from the Bay Area without telling me your engineering team is from the Bay Area.
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8/ One of my dad’s favorite summer time activities is squatting on the deck, smoking, drinking light beer, eating peanuts, and feeding peanuts to blue jays.
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17/ My dad grows a bunch of stuff: tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, peppers, zucchini, etc.
When we were little, my dad asked me and my sister to relieve ourselves into a bucket in the back yard since it was good fertilizer and free.
My mom quickly put an end to that.
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Lina Khan blocked both the Spirit/JetBlue and iRobot (Roomba)/Amazon mergers, and now both Spirt and iRobot are shutting down, cancelling pensions, and firing everyone.
If you don’t know Lina Khan, now is a great time to know about her. She’s now on Zohran Mamdani’s transition team. She’s also the former FTC Chair, only 36, & committed to leveling the playing field for everyday Americans. She is an absolute star. This is what hope feels like.
Community note
Correction: The FTC/Lina Khan did not block these deals. JetBlue–Spirit was halted following a DOJ antitrust suit and court ruling. Amazon–iRobot was abandoned after EU antitrust opposition. Attributing both outcomes to Khan is inaccurate.
justice.gov/archives/opa/p… reuters.com/markets/deals/
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The company that built this, SNCF, tried to work with @CaHSRA to build California’s HSR but rage quit and took a North Africa contract bc it was less bureaucratically dysfunctional.
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16/ My dad drove the same car for 18 years (totaled twice, not his fault) until it literally spontaneously caught fire.
The fire department (which my dad is friends with somehow) agreed to tow it for free if they could keep it as a case study.
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the houthi conflict is forcing leftists to defend slavery just so they don’t have to support the us military
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The reason San Francisco Fire Dept uses huge articulated trucks that are less effective/safe than modern ladder trucks is bc they guarantee two union driver jobs (front & rear). They use bespoke wood ladders to guarantee an unnecessary union carpenter. It’s all just rent-seeking.
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I really despise San Francisco’s default helplessness towards crime, as if thieves were some uncontrollable force of nature.
A better sign would be “Burglary is Punishable by up to 3 Years in Prison and $10,000 Fines”
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i love that we're still trying to figure out optimal man-portable anti-drone design
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i love this story
vancouver left nimbys supported indigenous peoples, expecting a noble savage return to wilderness
the tribes are building 13K homes and adding $15B to their real estate portfolio
now the left nimbys don’t like the indigenous peoples
vancouversun.com/opinion/col…
“What chafes critics, even those who might consider themselves progressive, is that they expect reconciliation to instead look like a kind of reversal, rewinding the tape of history to some museum-diorama past.” apple.news/AmvjjRLoFRpm_7V0v…
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20/ My dad randomly knows a lot of contemporary Native American history.
Why? He goes to the reservations to buy cigarettes and gasoline (no tax), and then hangs for a bit and smokes with the locals.
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hard to beat Boltzmann’s tombstone which is just his glowering bust and the formula for entropy
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18/ My dad works on construction sites a lot. Sometimes he’ll have a pack of Taiwanese sausage w him.
There are now groups of burly construction workers in my hometown who like Taiwanese sausage bc my dad will hand them out (w raw garlic ofc).
My dad is a sausage dealer.
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Unnecessary self-own. Kansas and Idaho produce Nobel laureates at 70x the rate of India per capita.
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Humans and octopuses evolved eyes independently, but we got ours with optical nerves attaching to the front of the retina and octopuses through the back so we have a random blindspot and they don’t.
Anatomy is full of cables that were connected 3 hundred million years ago and are tied in knots because they can never be disconnected.
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The US government banning Juul, an American company, so less-regulated Chinese cos Guangdong Qisitech (Geek Bar) and Shenzhen iMiracle (Elf Bar) could own the nicotine market was so incredibly stupid.
vaping seems way more evil than cigarettes.
im treating a zoomer patient this week with fairly serious alcohol dependency/withdrawal and risk of seizures, but he really wants to leave the hospital, citing nicotine cravings. been kind of confused bc he's on maximum patch + 4mg nicotine gum as often as he wants it, he's currently racking up like 60mg of nicotine a day (equivalent to 3 packs of cigs)
turns out he's going through 1 of those disposable vapes called a geek bar every 2 days, roughly equivalent of 500-750mg of nicotine every single day. that's like nicotine equivalent of 30ish packs of cigs EVERY DAY.
no idea how you're supposed to quit in that situation. you'd probably have to taper over like...a year?
real people are being legitimately one shot by a machine with more compute than what it took to put us on the moon because it dispenses the most addictive substance in the world at quantities that would make the average SERIOUS smoker sick
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Leftists mistake wealth creation for theft. In their zero-sum world, if Tesla didn’t exist, its billions would “belong” to the working class, never mind that it wouldn’t exist at all.
Imagine a vampire came to the New World with Columbus in 1492.
If he somehow managed to earn or steal the equivalent of $1 million 2025 US dollars every day, he wouldn't become a trillionaire until about 4232 — 2,740 years later.
Not even Dracula himself would be as effective a blood sucker as oligarchic trillionaires-to-be like Elon Musk.
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15/ My dad’s favorite activity when we go on family trips is napping. He’ll nap in the galleries of museums, in his seat during musicals, on a bench in parks.
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for $42.5B you could send 10 Starlink terminals at full retail price ($500) to every family below the poverty line in the USA (7.4M) and still have $5.5B leftover for san francisco to spend on corrupt nonprofits
Three years.
$42.5 billion.
And not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks (and no project will break ground until next year).
Why didn’t we just mail people Starlink terminals?
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If we must talk about Japanese in Oppenheimer, then we need to talk about Chinese victims of Imperial Japan too.
If we talk about the Chinese, then we def need to talk about Han chauvinism against Manchu and Mongols.
If we talk about the Mongols, then we must talk about the Tatar conquest.
How can you talk about Tatars w/o talking about the assimilation of the Goths?
etc etc until we get to uhr-human #1 bonking uhr-human #2 with a rock
Just saw OPPENHEIMER, an in-depth character exploration of the people who built the atomic bomb, a weapon of mass destruction that killed a quarter million Japanese civilians. Film is 3 hours long and features zero Japanese people.
Community note
The film ´´Oppenheimer ´´ is a biographical drama based entirely on the life of the physicist Robert Oppenheimer. There are no records of him ever meeting a Japanese person so it would not make sense to create such scene as the project is a biopic, not a work of fiction
nme.com/news/film/chri…
edition.cnn.com/2023/07/20/ent
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Texas Instruments’ first precision-guided ordnance (AGM-45 Shrike) predates its first calculator (Cal-Tech) by four years.
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remember kids, if you are a minority but have your own opinions and aren't useful as a token to leftists, they'll just revert to Original Flavor Racism™
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people often forget but the ballpoint pen is an incredible piece of precision engineering
China had to import the balls for decades and wasn't able to domestically manufacture them until 2017
most countries can't domestically manufacture ballpoint pens
bbc.com/news/business-385661…
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24/ When I was in college, my dad found a great deal on some whiskey and tried to have some mailed to me.
I almost got in a LOT of trouble with the resident dean.
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San Francisco sanctuary policy was used to release the illegal immigrant who killed a woman in front of her father on the Embarcadero, against a Federal request to not release him.
SAN FRANCISCO WILL REMAIN A SANCTUARY CITY
This is my first piece of legislation I introduced today as Supervisor and I am thankful to ALL TEN of my colleagues on the San Francisco Board of Supervisor for cosponsoring my resolution affirming this.
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New York is about to get its progressive-led lost decade just like the West Coast
NYC socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani a fan of abolishing SHSAT for elite schools trib.al/eLLPSnJ
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23/ My dad has this skill where he can put a steamed spare rib in his mouth, and while reading a newspaper, spit out a completely clean bone (kind of like eating a cherry). He does this at dim sum all the time.
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Lockheed Martin employees can order Carhartt jackets with naval ballistic missiles embroidered:
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Not a single top performing public transit system in the world is free.
The purpose of a nominal fare with strict enforcement beyond operational revenue is that it’s a very simple and effective filter for antisocial behavior that makes public transit unpleasant and unsafe.
Public transit is a public good—and it should be free.
That’s why @RepPressley and I are reintroducing the Freedom to Move Act to make fare-free transit a reality and close the transit equity gap.
ALT Full text link in reply
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Modern unions are why America doesn’t have automated ports, why major cities don’t have Waymo, why public services are mired in cost disease, and why public school reading and math proficiency is tanking despite record per-student spending.
This Labor Day, thank unions for:
✔️weekends
✔️8-hour workdays
✔️a minimum wage
✔️paid overtime
✔️breaks during work
✔️the right to strike
✔️child labor laws
✔️workplace safety standards
Now, let us grow the trade union movement and win more for workers.
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Let me get this straight:
Mamdani’s dad had his assets seized and was deported from an African nation for not being black.
He comes to US where he is able to become a citizen and teach at an Ivy.
He uses his elite social position to lecture about how the US is evil and racist.
Zohran Mamdani's father believes:
▪️The Allies and Nazis had the same goal
▪️Abraham Lincoln was Hitler's inspiration
▪️White people are the oppressors, America is the root of all evil
▪️BLM is the resistance
Blah blah blah. Another wealthy leftist who hates America. Now we know who Zohran gets it from.
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